… I support Januhairy’s intentions, and if it encourages more women to embrace their body hair, that’s lovely. But let’s please keep it in perspective: a white woman discovering and promoting the wonders of not shaving her pits, in the dead cold of winter, when we shave the least anyway, is not a particularly brave stance.

Pretty white women are often celebrated for their bushy eyebrows or for their courageousness in growing long, silky strands from their pits, but it’s black and brown women and trans people we should be honoring and highlighting; they are routinely mocked, harassed, and threatened for refusing to conform to Euro-centric, Western standards of beauty. While white women are liberating their pits, brown people, who have darker, and oftentimes coarser, thicker hair (in more places), are contending with colonialist expectations of what their bodies, and hair, are supposed to look like.

Colonialism … is there nothing bad that can’t be traced back to it?

Anyway, forget all that. The value is that it triggered Jesse Singal to write an epic thread about Feel-Bad Liberalism. Stay with us here for a bit.

Feel-Bad Liberalism tells you that even though you THINK you have the right politics, really, you're a piece of shit because of some pesky ID category you can't dislodge. Luckily, there's always a training or more content you can consume to try to scrub the stain off.

Feel-Bad Liberalism is inimical to any sort of solidarity because it is designed to carve people up into finer and finer groups as a cheap power play, and to sell them stuff based on the groups they've been shunted into

Feel-Bad Liberalism is a scam and has no capability to address any of the major problems in the US progressives and leftists agree need to be solved. It's a way for mediocre people with nothing of value to say to assert power and sell stuff.

I gotta write an actual piece about this stuff. It's such a dead-end and so many young people are having the Feel-Bad Liberalism model burned into their poor vulnerable malleable brains in their early years as activists or (huge air quotes) "journalists."

If something really has a similar structure as a cult, where you just buy or read more and more and more stuff, but there's never a point where someone pats you on the shoulder and says "you're good now — you're fine," doesn't that raise certain questions?

Normal, healthy adults do not respond to clearly bad-faith or ill-formed or aggressively inflammatory claims about their moral worth coming from internet weirdos with "I'm so sorry! Tell me more!" This is not a normal way to be a person in a really complicated world.

fucked over by the fact that our country does not provide people with the basic shit other rich countries do. Ask anyone who isn't super-wealthy who has had a kid! It's insane. It's unfair. And you CANNOT fix this shit if you have 19-year-old strippers who believe themselves to

be "privileged" because they read some dumb idiot websites. The secret is the people who write this stuff don't WANT this 19-year-old stripper to have access to better healthcare and daycare and everything else. They just. Want. Her. To. Feel. Shitty. So she'll keep buying their

pablum. Christ, how do people not see this? It is such a transparent scam. Take the anger that SHOULD be directed at the ridiculous way our society is run and redirect it inward so people hate THEMSELVES instead and come to you for purification, since you claim to offer it.

(In conclusion: When the taqueria near me that is tasty shuts down, that's Feel-Bad Liberalism. When my heater clanks loudly in the middle of the night, that's Feel-Bad LIberalism. The Matrix sequels? Feel-Bad Liberalism.)

Thread. Jesse Singal is beyond giving a f**k about what angry people on Twitter think and is just telling some angry truths. I will be amused by attempts from people to tell me why anything he says in this long thread is wrong. https://t.co/l5LXD6kaO2

Good thread. Thanks for sharing.This is possibly the most important item.It points to the fundamental flaw of all leftist/progressive thought that makes it a dangerous religion. There is no end point. Followers can never be faithful enough. https://t.co/e6bwbqFk4G